Boot camp for the bonus years

This is an archaic blog, written a few years ago when I turned 75. In which I bully myself into making 12 lifestyle changes in a single year, hoping to increase my health and happiness in old age and reduce my chances of getting dementia. This is my personal boot camp for the extra years—the bonus years that we never expected or desired. The years of ageing and old age.

I’ve looked at the 2015 World Report on ageing and health. Or rather I’ve looked at the web page about the launch of the World report on ageing and health and peeked at the report itself. One day soon I’ll read the whole report, which I’m sure is important and interesting and valuable.

But I’ve parked any closer analysis until I get over my latest hissy fit. This has nothing to do with the report and everything to do with pronouns — and my sense of identity as a 75-year-old.

Here’s how the summary begins.

30 September 2015 — Comprehensive public health action on population ageing is urgently needed. This will require fundamental shifts, not just in the things we do, but in how we think about ageing itself. 

OK, fair enough, in fact how very true, but I wonder who you mean by we. Does that include me? Or is that just public health people? (The latter: this is a WHO report, doh!)

When I was a child I thought as a child

When I was a child, people wrote reports about children, and I didn’t care what they wrote. They wrote about me, but I didn’t read the reports.

I am a woman now, and people also write reports about women’s problems. Actually women write reports about women’s problems. I have helped to write such reports. That made all the difference: I was one of we, and we were also them, the object of the reports.

Now that I am theoretically an old person I’m all confused, because the final sentence of the summary paragraph implies that old people are only the subject of the report, not participants — not researchers, thinkers, doers, writers.

Making these investments will have valuable social and economic returns, both in terms of health and wellbeing of older people and in enabling their on-going participation in society.

At this point I’m thinking spitefully, ‘So I am not one of you. I am one of them. And you will allow me to continue participate in society? How very kind.’

‘We have to talk about Kevin.’ For Kevin, read the old people. And now, how alarming, that’s me.

Well, suck it up, self!

They are devising solutions for us. We are the problem, they are the problem-solvers. Who are the problem solvers? WHO are.